Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Students and Surveillance

Instead, FERPA threatens to take federal funding away from schools who
are found to have breached student privacy while it fails to mandate
bare minimum security standards for the storage and transmission of
student data. Though lawmakers and privacy advocates are regularly
outraged at the immense volume of student data freely floating through
the web, the repeated failure to create legislation that protects
student data from being used for profit is astounding. In the case of
Securly, the first filtering tool designed for schools, the controls set
by IT and administration for web access can extend far beyond the walls
of the school and determine what content students can access while
using school- issued machines from their home internet connections.

Though teachers request better and broader internet access for students
in their classrooms, administrator-imposed blocks and filters on school
internet leave most students woefully unprepared to navigate the
realities of the web. When students do find a way around the tools used
to limit their access to the outside world (this happened with a group
of students who were given iPads in the Los Angeles United School
district last year), they’re labelled as “hackers” or miscreants, and
disciplined for using Tor, a tool popular among students for anonymous
web browsing and circumventing blacklists that ban websites from school
networks. While the company claims to only access posts that are public
in the school districts they work with, and says it works closely with
school districts to tailor their monitoring programs to prevent
cyberbullying, suicide and active shooter incidents, it is very easy—
too easy, in fact— to use such technologies to identify and target
students who have been labeled deviant or delinquent within their
communities, or who are otherwise outspoken and critical of their
teachers and schools. After being pulled from class multiple times,
suspended from school, and barred from attending a school field trip
(the same punishment was not doled out to the male student involved in
the messaging), the ACLU stepped in to defend the student’s right to
privacy and free speech in communications outside of school property.
Some of these technologies include:
RFID chips embedded into student badges to monitor student attendance
(this is tied to state funding) and track student movement around on
campus. By watching every move that students make while learning, we
model to students that we do not trust them– that ultimately, their
every move will be under scrutiny from others. Despite it being well
within the scope of educational technology tools to track, identify and
expose biases towards groups of students, technologists avoid
implementing small changes that monitor educator performance and correct
for unconscious biases that negatively affect student learning. Though
the surveillance mechanisms at play in education technologies affect the
privacy of millions of students who pass through the education system
each year, this system is a profound, persistent threat to the privacy
and individual liberty of LGBTQ students, low-income students, and
students of color who have already been so severely failed by the status
quo.